Word Stack or A Pile of Thoughts

There are two ways to view knowledge: one places a predominance on its ability to become power, and the other places predominance on the aesthetic joy of pursuing knowledge as part of finding human meaning.  Notice that the discussion is not of one view or another.  I do not see a reason why they should be mutually exclusive.  However, when one starts studying, learning, and generating new knowledge, one view will come into the fore as part of the drive behind the pursuit of that knowledge.  When this happens, the aura surrounding the body of knowledge being compiled shifts; the nature of the pursuit varies between the two views.

The first view is what I call politic knowledge.  It’s the pursuit of knowledge in order to allow the pursuer to have more choice and more influence.  This sort of knowledge banks on reputation and practical application. Another way to explain it is by referring to this knowledge as utilitarian or operational knowledge.  To the student, knowing something is valuable because of the specific social goal the student wants to achieve.  An example could be a young lady who studies physics because she wants to, as a primary goal, make a statement in her country about women being nuclear scientists.  Another example, perhaps closer to home, is the young man who chooses to learn the field of nursing and health science in order to be employable in the world economy.  These are people who approach knowledge as a tool to achieve something.

The second view of knowledge is what I call aesthetic knowledge.  It’s the pursuit of an idea because an idea is beautiful.  Gregory Chaitlin, an eminent mathematician who pursues meta-mathematics (wheww… an amazing field!) talks about mathematical theory as if it were poetry, wine or sex.  Knowledge isn’t pursued because of definite goal; it’s pursued because it is the passion of the human spirit.  Why explore?  Why question?  Why this intense curiosity about the world?  Because of the search for meaning, for fulfillment, for appreciation.  Our world, in the words of Dr. Richard Dawkins, is an "elegant reality".  And fully appreciating this reality needs a mature body of knowledge.  This approach to knowledge is preoccupied with theory rather than application.  It’s so much deeper and richer, and profoundly more human and artistic, than the mundaneness of the practical (you may see my bias here).

"And then he dreamed of a world exactly like this one, filled with people exactly like the people of his world, all speaking and living as if alive, as if it weren’t a dream.  Everyone around him existed, and only he knew that his world was not what it was: that the love he felt, the night spent in her bed, the stories waiting to be published on his computer, the 9-5 job that waited for him– none of it was real, and he knew this."

"And because he knew this, he let nothing slide: every moment could be his last, the last taste of a world that would dissipate with his waking.  So, he lived in his dream, he tasted her laughter, he touched her tears, he heard her soul."

"And when he awoke, he regretted nothing."

This is a picture from my Uncle Louie Sobong stealing the show from Toni Braxton at a concert in Las Vegas. 

Life is essentially a pursuit of consciousness.  As we grow, we expand our knowledge of the world around us, and in so doing, become beings of consciousness.  Its an exploration of sorts, and living and being and becoming are the processes of this exploration.  The profound end of this consciousness is that we find that the most fulfilling exploration is the act of exploring another person.  Falling in love is like a heightened form of research that’s less lonely.  Love makes a person happy because it allows them to explore and be explored.  The profound difference between the knowledge of Self and the knowledge of the Other is the hues by which all other knowledge is translated.  Two people will see something in different ways; and that’s exciting, when they can share their different yet mutual experience "of the mundane and the fantastic" *Heroes E.23 "how to stop an exploding man". 

I live for the pursuit of knowledge because the act of exploration makes me feel alive, human.  When I’m learning, I become something new.  And for me, that’s a thought worth thinking.

She flicked the cigarette away, watching the miniature explosion of orange embers as it collided with the pavement.  A puff of smoke escaped into the wet night. Summer was over.

"Is this the sort of place you think about when you’re feeling the melodrama?" She whispered it to herself, feeling that weird mixture of guilt and honesty.  She felt around in her jacket pocket, pulled out a little gleaming piece of metal and lit up another smoke. 

The car pulled up to her, and she watched as he cut the engine, and the lights went off.  She was watching the afterglow of the headlights when the door clicked and he got out.

"Why’d you call me out here?"

"No particular reason."

He breathed out a sigh of immense exasperation.  She hated it when he did that, but she never said so. 

He took a deep breath, and let it out.  He had things waiting for him back at the apartment: numbers to be crunched, articles to read, emails to answer.  With a breath, all that ceased to really matter.  It was the here and now, her.

"Is this the place you go when you’re feeling the melodrama?"

"Yeah."

"I thought so." He paused, putting his hands in his pocket.  He felt the familiar shape of a pen. "It’s real nice.  Is that the bell tower over there?"

"Where?"

"Over by the river, the one that’s all lit with lights and shit."

"Oh, yeah.  That’s the bell tower."

They stood together, quiet.  Sometime ago, there was a bench in the park, she had asked him for a light.  They had sex that evening, sometime ago.  Neither of them could really remember.  It didn’t mean anything anymore.

"Wanna go get a soda or something?" he asked.

"I don’t know."

"Okay, once figure that out, go get yourself something.  I’m gonna go get something at the IHOP."

"Can’t you wait?"

"What for?  You’re not making up your mind."

She kept her eyes on the bell tower, on the lights glinting in the night.  She vaguely remembered that smoking impaired night vision.  What bullshit.

"Well, if you can’t wait, then go ahead."

She listened to the car drive off down the hill, and she watched the headlights melt into the night. 

The story that pretended to be real and in the end, destroyed reality and became a waking, walking, breathing figure all unto itself; the Story that breathed itself into existence, slaying the author. 

The idea of the simulacra isn’t a new one; Jorge Luis Borges wrote his fiction using this idea as the fulcrum of the narrative.  Baudrillard coins the term in his theory of language.

Of what significance is such an idea to human existence?  Why bother with an exploration of meaning and language? 

I think there are a number of simple ways to answer these questions: simple stabs in the dark by ones who think simple questions are easy to answer.  But of course, these one-liner answers– "Because of curiousity," "Because we want to understand language," "Because it makes us more aware,"– are insufficient.  They do not begin to tackle the beautiful complexity that underlies the process of human inquiry.  I revolt against the quick and easy answer for the reason that the knowledge I seek is that of the explorer, the adventurer who plunges into the wildness of thoughts, the brambles of contradiction and seeks, not answers, but understanding. 

And so, what then of the significance of how arbitrary language can be (that is, at least from one perspective)?  If one had to trace the pattern, and follow the meandering logic of the statement that "the meaning of language is arbitrary", it leads to a curious road.  Language is comprised of symbols– the entire pantheon of symbols, from the physical edifices of political power to road signs and Euclidean geometry– which are representations of meaning.  In themselves, they contain no meaning.  The meaning behind them comes from our society’s agreement or convention on what meaning must be attributed to what particular symbol.  Borges speaks of an arrow, "pointing the way", which I presume to be some sort sign to give direction, as a symbol that has "mutated" from one of iron and wood, from the object that clouded the skies at Thermopylae and pierced the skin of Harald.  In other words, Borges sees the mutation of meaning; the symbol remains unchanged, but the arbitrary meaning given to it by social convention has morphed from that of an object of terror and death to the harmless thing of streets corners and detours (which, in turn, may also give another meaning to one who has been mugged on the street corner, or has experienced being stuck in traffic because they followed the arrow). 

Which leads to another disturbing thought.  Mathematics is actually a science of symbols and their definite relationship to one another.  The relationships between the digits, between the numbers, are there by social convention, by our articulation of meaning through the symbols of the arabic numeric system.  "1" and "200" do not hold any meaning on to themselves; We, the readers, give them their meaning.  And even the concept of "1" on its own, is not very useful.  What disturbs me is the idea that numbers are consistent and precise, meaning that the convention of meaning has reached such a level that a thousand different people can arrive at the same conclusion using the convened operations of mathematics.  This has made mathematics an extreme application of the arbitrary, to the point where we take it for granted.

Karl Popper, the English thinker and proponent of the scientific method, would argue otherwise, that mathematics belongs in the realm of the abstract, which exists apart from humanity’s arbitrary meaning.  However, I’m not quite ready to simply accept this enshrining of mathematics as apart from human interpretation.  What makes more sense is that all symbols represent an abstract ideal that can never be articulated, because in the process of articulation, they lose their abstract nature and become– to stick with Popper’s classification of realities– mental, that is, merely part of the construction of human experience.  I say "merely" in the sense that through interpretation, whatever meaning is given is now arbitrary.  The abstract remains an unattainable sublime, and our attempts to approximate the abstract result in its reduction. 

If mathematics cannot be trusted– in so far as its being real rather than useful– then in a sense, there is no reality behind logical thinking; "logic" is another victim of arbitrary meaning, and reason is non-existent, except of course, in the minds of those who claim to possess it or wield it.

At the end of this discussion, we arrive at a bleak outlook: a world in which reason is only an illusion, windmill that we thought was a dragon, a barmaid who we thought was the Lady Dulcinea.  It is an existence of collective madness, where everything is as we agree it to be, rather than what it actually is.  And yet, we call ourselves sane and reasonable, and we thrust our reason upon others.  Isn’t this the core of conflict? This expectation that we are more correct than the other, as if there is some absolute standard to measure ourselves against?  As if our language, our meaning, is fortified in unquestionable "rightness"?  That’s the madness of human civilization, a quest for meaning that really cannot be found.

Which leads us to Don Quixote, whose madness came from his inability to dissociate the symbol from meaning, the language from the reality.  But, as he comes to his sense, Alonso Quijano realizes that his pretended reality has begotten itself in the form of actual reality, and that he must now defend this new reality with the same fervor that created it. 

Yes, language and its arbitrary meaning can be only pretend realities; but, if Baudrillard’s ideas have weight in this matter, there is a faint shadow of hope.  Our pretend realities can become actual realities because that is how we have constructed them to be, and the conflict an irremovable facet of the imperfection of our articulation of meaning.  Language is therefore, the vehicle of reality rather than its destroyer; or rather, in the process of developing a reality, it destroys the old ones.  And this, at least for me, is less troubling, because it indicates a meaning that is evolving, growing, fearlessly facing its contradictions and lending itself to destruction and reconstruction.  That could very well mean progress, which is an encouraging thought. 

Significance of inquiry?  In this case, the failure of words to capture significance seems appropriate.